IT asset remarketing: Are you leaving money on the table?

When it comes time for organizations to replace IT assets, what happens to them? Where do the retired assets go? The short answer is most of them end up as electronic waste (e-waste), a term to describe used electronics that have been retired and are discarded, donated, or given to a recycler.

But IT assets that have reached the end of their useful life aren’t necessarily worthless. There may still be value we can extract from them in the e-waste afterlife.

Missed value recovery opportunities

Did you know there’s a way to recoup some of your company’s money spent on IT assets? To reduce the overall total cost of ownership (TCO), you can recover some of the value from your IT assets rather than send them to a landfill.

Through remarketing, you can sell your retired IT assets for parts into secondary markets.

E-waste is predicted to reach 74 million metric tonnes by 2030, a 20 million metric ton jump from 53.6 million in 2019. Think of how much money will be left on the table (and in a landfill) if this continues (and what your organization may be missing out on).

To provide a clearer view of this, we’re shedding light on how much organizations spend on IT assets, how many remarket those assets, and how much money is left on the table.

What's the real IT asset TCO for enterprise organizations?

Global IT spending is set to reach $4.4 trillion in 2022. While this includes IT assets where there is a certain level of value recovery like data centers, software, and mobile devices, it also contains intangible assets that aren't considered e-waste like IT services.

The concept of IT asset disposition (ITAD), which covers recycling, remarketing, repurposing, and disposing of retired IT assets, has been around for quite some time. While its roots in product lifecycle management date back to 1985, ITAD didn't come into its own until the early 2000s.

While ITAD is still a relatively new market, it's seen tremendous growth and is projected to reach $24.5 billion by 2026. From that figure, the Remarketing and Value Recovery segment is projected to reach $7.3 billion by the same year.

Given an expected 4% increase in IT spending year over year, spending could reach over $5 trillion by 2026. Of that total IT spend, only 48% of global organizations are participating in secure ITAD practices with only 14% recovering value from their retired IT assets. This means there's a big opportunity for organizations looking to recoup IT money spent through remarketing efforts.

If you want to understand the value of your unused or retired IT assets, we recommend you:

• Connect quarterly with your IT department to review what happens to older IT assets
• Develop a plan to optimize handling of IT assets
• Confirm your ITAD vendor (if you have one) offers remarketing as a service

By finding out how to recover value from your older IT assets, you help lower the overall total cost of ownership and save your organization money while minimizing environmental impact.